LOVE LETTERS OF SPRING ~ from Scott and Zelda, presented by their fan, Absolutely*Kate, sparking Double*Feature Thursdays & Tuesdays ~ AT THE BIJOU

Spring 1919

Sweetheart,

Please, please don't be so depressed -- We'll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever -- and until we are, I am loving, loving every tiny minute of the day and night -- Maybe you won't understand this, but sometimes when I miss you most, it's hardest to write -- and you always know when I make myself -- Just the ache of it all -- and I can't tell you. If we were together, you'd feel how strong it is -- you're so sweet when you're melancholy. I love your sad tenderness -- when I've hurt you -- That's one of the reasons I could never be sorry for our quarrels -- and they bothered you so -- Those dear, dear little fusses, when I always tried so hard to make you kiss and forget -- 

~ Love, Scott

 

Scott -- there's nothing in all the world I want but you -- and your precious love -- All the material things are nothing. I'd just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence -- because you'd soon love me less -- and less -- and I'd do anything -- anything -- to keep your heart for my own -- I don't want to live -- I want to love first, and live incidentally -- Why don't you feel that I'm waiting -- I'll come to you, Lover, when you're ready -- Don't don't ever think of the things you can't give me -- You've trusted me with the dearest heart of all -- and it's so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had --

How can you think deliberately of life without me -- If you should die -- O Darling -- darling Scott -- It'd be like going blind. I know I would, too, -- I'd have no purpose in life -- just a pretty -- decoration. Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered -- and I was delivered to you -- to be worn -- I want you to wear me, like a watch -- charm or a button hole boquet -- to the world. And then, when we're alone, I want to help -- to know that you can't do anything without me.

I'm glad you wrote Mamma. It was such a nice sincere letter -- and mine to St. Paul was very evasive and rambling. I've never, in all my life, been able to say anything to people older than me -- Somehow I just instinctively avoid personal things with them -- even my family. Kids are so much nicer. 

~ Love, Zelda

Jazzed'up lovers? Well yes. The beautiful and the damned? Of course ~many times, both of them, but they've been my literary heroes through love-to-read and adore-to-write years. I scribed my college thesis in Honours Communication on "Elegy to a Poor Son of a Bitch", with more research on Fitzgerald than most libraries at that time had in stock in stacks.  I got an A+ with comments by Professor Bard, (honest - that was his name ~ even I can't make up good stuff like that), in red flowing ink along margins of crisply typed papers. (Remember those? And the joys of 'erasable bond' when it papered out?) The insightful comments and the esteemed professor must surely have manifested into my psyche . . .  for to this day I bear an ongoing regard for comments on-the-flow and professors in the know. Well, one very special sage and tender one in particular.

But this isn't my story. It's Zelda's and Scott's. Past all the folks who hanker Hemingway's way, I've clung to loyalties, as loyalties should be clung to, in the lyrical phrases-make-a-difference Fitzgerald's way. Fellow writers I admire know loyalty's influence too. Author Laurita Miller does it with how Poe fascinates through her certainly not-of-the-ordinary wonder'pieces, while author Anthony Venutolo of Bukowski influence favouring, 'gets it' -  my Fitzgerald appeal and that time in the world of writers in jazzy sassy don't-mean-a-thing-if-it-ain't-got-that-zing mode. You all do. Somewhere inside. Something that moves you, grooves you . . . yes, even behooves you.

Which it did me.

To ponder and write the following Double*Feature piece in a challenge to voice out in one's literary hero's style. My Fitzgerald saved-fave now joins the showcase grace AT THE BIIJOU. This piece endured and THE BIJOU ensued from how swirlcomestances came at me. Phoenix from asses stuff. Isn't that how it goes? When you're open for goodness, it can sail right in.

Thank*You.

For reading this preamble into

my sailing ditty of 'perfect response'.

Absolutely glad am I to know you in how words and worlds sail . . . and how you stroll or saunter in, find your favourite row of red velvet seats AT THE BIJOU, and add to moments of a particular perfect response.

It makes me a far finer person, writer, promoter.

~ Absolutely*Kate

ZELDA SAYRES FITZGERALD ~ The original Roaring 20's American flapper, beloved and damned wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda is a hazy crazy life-endowed incarnation of the most perennial of all fashionable inspiration of that time ~ jazz and liquor. Her poetically troubled marriage intermingled with artistic glamour and ballerina ambitions dancing by. This inspired not only Scott, but an ebullient America on the rise with set curls, creamy pearls, raised jewels, dropped waists and magpie eyes, both innocently and cynically - wide open. 

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD ~ Born poor but lived proud, particularly of his family's relation to Francis Scott Key. Scott was his own brand of eternal-young, dashing, handsome and ambitious. As an Army lieutenant stationed in Alabama he found it smooth and easy to impress girls by talking up his literary ambitions, asking, "What sort of heroine would you like to be?" Perspicaciously he knew it would demand more to attract the wealthy and capricious 17-year-old rebel debutante, Miss Zelda Sayre. Local Southern boys waited around the porch for months for the pleasure of a date. Army aviators vying for attention soared risky fly-by stunts over the Sayre family home, oft times with calamitous collisions.

Scott not of a calamity nature, switched to his other best uniform, the one of the classic Brooks Brothers cut, cutting a rug, regaling his intent to become a famous author, suggesting that the female lead in his novel-in-progress was a girl quite a lot like her. He intrigued her. She took him seriously, and tried him out sexually, as the story likewise was regaled. A tacit agreement was reached. As she expressed it to one of his Princeton classmates, "If Scott sells the book, I'll marry the man, because he is sweet."

SCOTT AND ZELDA ~ were the golden couple who charmed the 1920's, epitomizing the roaring potential of promise. Both brilliance and excess glimmered in their creativity and their marriage. All was grist for the Fitzgerald grin, gin and writing mill ~ tabletop dancing, fountain diving at The Plaza, Zelda letters and Zelda diaries, neighbors, friends, and even spurred on affairs . . . Inspiration was the art for life. 

Scott and Zelda were fabled, fact and fictionalized into Fitzgerald novels as legend and embodiment of the triumphs and tragedies which simultaneously glorified and afflicted their times. 

As writers write

and life imitates art,

passion and poignancy 

will always have their pages.

~ Absolutely*Kate